NOTES for Col 2:6-15

Paul (certainly not accidentally) speaks a lot and very often about faithfulness. And it is not only about faithfulness to God, to Christ and the Kingdom, although first of all, indeed it is about it. But in addition to these, it is about the faithfulness to the choice once made, which is sometimes, as it may seem paradoxical, more important than faithfulness to God, Christ or the Kingdom. Indeed what means faithfulness to God? Or faithfulness to Christ? If Christianity was a new religion, or a new theology, or a new moral doctrine, everything would be simple and clear: in that case it would be enough for us to declare our commitment to the appropriate doctrine and its Founder, well, maybe even participate regularly in some ritual activities and carry on certain distinctive marks. But indeed, it is not about a new doctrine and either about a new religion, but about a new life, about a life in the Kingdom, that the Savior brought to the world.

And constancy is necessary in life, and above all constancy in relationships, defining our life priorities, which in their turn, are defined by the value system, that we follow. Of these elements, is formed faithfulness - to friends, the family, to the coreligionists, to the vocation of life and to the chosen path. And mainly such faithfulness distinguishes itself in no way from the faithfulness to God and Christ, without which is impossible the life in the Kingdom. Faithfulness is one, and it means constancy of the relationships, and also the constancy of the system of the values and life priorities. Without such faithfulness, any life is impossible not only in the Kingdom, but also in our non transformed world. However in the world non transformed without this internal spiritual core, which at the level of life relationships of life, manifests itself through faithfulness, one can in a way still live, although it is of course only with a big reserve that we can call life this existence, that man has to lead.

And here is, in the Kingdom, without it, it is impossible to hold on even one moment. Because, the spiritual space of the Kingdom is formed in particular by relations - the relationship of its inhabitants between themselves, their relationship with Christ, the relationship of Christ Himself with the Father. Without them, there is no Kingdom. And thus, it is also not without faithfulness, without which relationships in the kingdom are impossible.

Paul speaks of the Christian life as "abiding" and as "walking" in Christ. In the language of Jewish tradition, such words usually described a faithful Jew's following the Torah and keeping the Torah, observing the commandments. The apostle, as we can see, uses the same words to speak about following Christ and about relationship with Him. And this, of course, is no accident: the first, and perhaps also the second and even the third, generation of Christians saw in Christ the image of the living Torah, the fulfillment of an ideal that before Christ's coming had remained unattainable.

Every believing Jew who took spiritual life seriously strove to become a living Torah. But for this one had to live in such a way that nothing except the spiritual and moral imperative that came from God and was called the inner Torah would determine the life of the seeker. It was practically impossible for a fallen human being to attain such a state: the nature damaged by sin stood in the way. Jesus can show the world the example of the living Torah precisely because His nature is free from the power of sin. But the same task stands before each of His followers: Christ's followers also must become a living Torah.

Otherwise it is impossible to live the life of the Kingdom, for here one must be in a special spiritual state that requires a certain quality of inner life, and this quality requires that a person's life be determined only by the inner Torah, only by God's will acting in that person and by the corresponding intentions. Such a person becomes like Christ not outwardly, but in essence, for in Christ too God's will acts directly, and in all its fullness. Yet a person can become a living Torah only in direct communion with Christ, in the spiritual space of the relationships that bind him to Him.

Otherwise nothing will come of it: without living relationships with Christ and outside them, a person will remain alone with his sin, as happened in pre-Christian times, and then failure is inevitable. This abiding in the dynamic of living relationships with Christ, as though within them, in the spiritual space they form, is what Paul calls "abiding" in Christ and "walking" in Christ, pointing to both as an indispensable condition of normal Christian life.

Paul (certainly not accidentally) speaks a lot and very often about faithfulness. And it is not only about faithfulness to God, to Christ and the Kingdom, although first of all, indeed it is about it. But in addition to these, it is about the faithfulness to the choice once made, which is sometimes, as it may seem paradoxical, more important than faithfulness to God, Christ or the Kingdom. Indeed what means faithfulness to God? Or faithfulness to Christ? If Christianity was a new religion, or a new theology, or a new moral doctrine, everything would be simple and clear: in that case it would be enough for us to declare our commitment to the appropriate doctrine and its Founder, well, maybe even participate regularly in some ritual activities and carry on certain distinctive marks. But indeed, it is not about a new doctrine and either about a new religion, but about a new life, about a life in the Kingdom, that the Savior brought to the world.

And constancy is necessary in life, and above all constancy in relationships, defining our life priorities, which in their turn, are defined by the value system, that we follow. Of these elements, is formed faithfulness - to friends, the family, to the coreligionists, to the vocation of life and to the chosen path. And mainly such faithfulness distinguishes itself in no way from the faithfulness to God and Christ, without which is impossible the life in the Kingdom. Faithfulness is one, and it means constancy of the relationships, and also the constancy of the system of the values and life priorities. Without such faithfulness, any life is impossible not only in the Kingdom, but also in our non transformed world. However in the world non transformed without this internal spiritual core, which at the level of life relationships of life, manifests itself through faithfulness, one can in a way still live, although it is of course only with a big reserve that we can call life this existence, that man has to lead.

And here is, in the Kingdom, without it, it is impossible to hold on even one moment. Because, the spiritual space of the Kingdom is formed in particular by relations - the relationship of its inhabitants between themselves, their relationship with Christ, the relationship of Christ Himself with the Father. Without them, there is no Kingdom. And thus, it is also not without faithfulness, without which relationships in the kingdom are impossible.

Today the Orthodox Church celebrates the Circumcision of the Lord, remembering how the Lord Jesus was circumcised on the eighth day after His birth (Luke 2:21). The reading from the Letter to the Colossians reminds us that, being united with Christ, we also enter into His circumcision. "In Him," says the apostle, "you were also circumcised." What does this mean?

To understand this, we have to return to the Old Testament meaning of circumcision: the sign of God's covenant with Abraham. In His covenant with Abraham, God promised to make a great nation from him, to ensure that people's survival until all the families of the earth would be blessed in it, and in return He expected from Abraham and his descendants faith: trust in God, the entrusting of himself and his offspring into God's hands. The sign of such trust is circumcision, the cut-off piece of foreskin.

In Christ, however, absolute trust in the Father exists from eternity ("Before Abraham was, I am" - John 8:58). His circumcision is His sinlessness, flesh that has rejected sin, a sign not made by human hands of complete agreement with the Father. Therefore nothing sinful can be united with Him, and our baptism is at the same time our circumcision, cutting off sinfulness so that we may enter the body of Christ.

After reading today's passage from the Letter to the Colossians, many Christians begin to recoil from philosophy and from everything connected with intellectual life as though from a spiritual plague. And no wonder: one careless step, and philosophizing might cost you your salvation. Yet probably few reflect on the original meaning of the word Paul uses: love of wisdom, and specifically wisdom that follows the “laws” (the “elements,” as Paul calls them) “of this world.” For a person brought up in the biblical tradition, wisdom is not something theoretical or speculative, but something entirely practical. In the Old Testament books, wisdom was the name given to the skill of a craftsman, who in those days was always something of an artist; to the ability to govern a state; and even to proficiency in righteous living. For righteousness, as a divine-human work, required not only God's guidance, but also human skill, which helped the righteous person avoid sin and follow the Torah as far as was possible for someone whose nature was afflicted by sin. Love of wisdom based on the laws of our world—a world being transformed, but not yet fully transformed—could have only one consequence: such a lover would build his spiritual life, and indeed his life as a whole, according to those laws rather than the laws of the Kingdom. In this way one could indeed quickly lose both the Kingdom and salvation.

Reflecting on spiritual life, Paul mentions certain human teachings, which he calls "philosophy"; by following them, in the apostle's view, a person can easily lose the main thing that gives Christianity its meaning (vv. 8-10). And the main thing, according to Paul, is that new life, the life of the Kingdom, for which the Savior paid by His death on the cross (vv. 11-15). When he speaks of what was "against us" ("the handwriting that was against us," v. 14), the apostle, it appears, has the Torah in mind, whose testimony always only condemns the sinner by exposing his sins. Such testimony could be answered only by becoming completely free from sin and revealing the fullness of righteousness, becoming, in the expression common in rabbinic circles of that time, a "living Torah." But this ideal remained unattainable for a person wounded by original sin, and only the Savior Himself, in whom, according to Paul's word, all the fullness of God dwells (v. 9), was able to show the example of the "living Torah." It is precisely the pattern revealed by the Savior that renders the Torah's testimony about our sinfulness powerless and opens the road to the Kingdom for us (v. 14; the corresponding Greek word means not only "teaching," but also "example" or "pattern").

But, as it appears, the church in Colossae was being troubled by preachers who were trying, in essence, to return the Christians there to a pre-Christian past. Evidently they were the ones who gave special importance to the religious side of Judaism, again and again reminding the Colossian Christians of religious rules and customs and insisting on their strict observance as the chief condition for receiving the Kingdom (vv. 16-19). For Paul, however, any return to religion is not a path into the Kingdom, but a departure from it. He understands perfectly well that all religious norms and rules belong not to the Kingdom, but to our world, still not transformed (vv. 20-22). Of course, at times they can help a person on his spiritual path. But they can also become an obstacle for those seeking the Kingdom if they are made the goal and meaning of life: then they only create an illusion of spiritual life, while in reality having nothing to do with it. It is no accident that Paul says of such religiosity that it only has the appearance of wisdom, without truly being wisdom (v. 23): for him the Kingdom is the only goal of the Christian life, and he rejects everything that can distract from it and lead a person off the path.

In our everyday thinking, we suppose that repentance arises from sorrow over the lawlessness we have committed. But in today’s reading the apostle Paul says something very important: godly sorrow produces irrevocable repentance leading to salvation (in the Synodal translation: “godly sorrow produces unchanging repentance for salvation”). For this irrevocable, once-for-all change of mind to take place (the literal meaning of the Greek word usually translated as “repentance”), one must long for God, grieve at being separated from Him, and desire to meet Him. This alone bears fruit. This alone makes us capable of living according to truth and the commandments. All our striving for self-improvement is commendable, but fruitless.

Paul writes that Christianity presupposes spiritual life, not religious life. The church in Colossae had the same problems that were appearing then in other church communities: a withdrawal, to a certain degree of course, into religion; a tendency to replace spiritual life with religious life, with all the consequences that followed: growth of legalism, demands for obligatory observance of Jewish religious prescriptions, and the like.

Paul understands perfectly that the essence of Christianity is elsewhere: in Christ a person is transformed, his very nature, including his bodily nature, changes; a person participates in the life of the Kingdom, and the "body of flesh" is transformed as the person participates in this life. The apostle calls this transformation, in the spiritual sense, circumcision. Indeed, circumcision originally symbolized one or another kind of initiation, a person's transition into a new quality or a new state.

Initiations could be age-related or religious; in Yahwism circumcision came to symbolize entry into the community of God's people and participation in the spiritual fullness it bears. But there is no greater change than the one a person experiences when becoming a Christian and participating in the life of the Kingdom: here a fullness is opened to the participant that cannot be found anywhere else.

Here, in prospect, not only a change in a person's life and inner state is possible, but also the acquisition of a new quality of one's own nature, a transformation that will completely and forever make him different. Of course, the completion of this process will not take place before the day of the Savior's return and the full triumph of the Kingdom, but it begins when a person turns to Christ and first participates in the life of the Kingdom.

Meanwhile, fearing sin and its consequences, many strove backward into religion in order to hide there from the threatening danger. Indeed, religion is to a considerable degree sustained by fear, not fear of some unknown natural phenomena, as people once thought, but by that existential, metaphysical fear that a person experiences when he senses the damage done by sin to his own nature.

It is precisely about this fear that the apostle says that with Christ we have nothing to fear: He takes the consequences of the sins we have committed upon Himself, promising that He will help us deal with them and, in the end, be freed from them. On the cross He Himself tore up all our debt records, giving us the possibility of beginning life from a clean slate. No religion could do anything like this for us, as Paul reminds the recipients of his letter.

In our everyday thinking, we suppose that repentance arises from sorrow over the lawlessness we have committed. But in today’s reading the apostle Paul says something very important: godly sorrow produces irrevocable repentance leading to salvation (in the Synodal translation: “godly sorrow produces unchanging repentance for salvation”). For this irrevocable, once-for-all change of mind to take place (the literal meaning of the Greek word usually translated as “repentance”), one must long for God, grieve at being separated from Him, and desire to meet Him. This alone bears fruit. This alone makes us capable of living according to truth and the commandments. All our striving for self-improvement is commendable, but fruitless.

Continuing the discussion of Christianity and Christian life, Paul turns to the theme of his own ministry, and the apostle sees its meaning in the fact that the word of God was fulfilled in it (vv. 24-29). In speaking of "fulfillment," the apostle evidently has in mind the original sense of the corresponding Greek word, which implied "fulfillment" as filling up, bringing to fullness what had not yet reached fullness.

In this way Paul draws the attention of the recipients of his letter to the twofold task that stands before the Church in our world, which is being transformed but has not yet been transformed to the end, applying it to the concrete ministry of individual Christians. On the one hand, the ministry of every Christian presupposes his own rooting in the life of the Kingdom, which, of course, is unthinkable without the transformation of his human nature. For such transformation, God's direct action on this nature is necessary, and the apostle, of course, does not speak accidentally of the power of God working in him, as in everyone who does God's work (v. 29): for God's work cannot be done by human strength alone; here the direct intervention of the One who entrusted this work to the minister is needed.

On the other hand, the ministry of a minister turns out to be not simply the performance of a concrete task, even if that task is a commission given directly by God. It is directly connected with the fullness of the Kingdom, toward which every Christian strives. And every ministry, if it remains to the end God's work, becomes not only the minister's step toward this fullness, but also the emergence of the fullness of the Kingdom through a concrete ministry, manifested in it just as in every work of God. And the apostle's sufferings now turn out not simply to be sufferings for Christ; they turn out to be their continuation, just as the very existence of the Church in our world, not yet transformed to the end, turns out to be the continuation in it of that history of the Kingdom which began with the Savior's coming into the world and continued with His death on the cross and His resurrection.

That is why Paul speaks of the consolation that the news of his sufferings was to bring to the recipients of his letter (vv. 1-3): for they meant not only the apostle's own faithfulness to his ministry, but also that the Kingdom is growing and the day of its full triumph and the Savior's return is drawing near - news truly joyful for every Christian.